Two members of the KB Lab team have written a chapter for the newly published Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities! Mirjam Cuper wrote chapter eight: Getting Back in the Flow: An Outline for a Semi-Automated Digitisation Workflow to Improve the Quality of Digital Collections. Steven Claeyssens wrote chapter fourteen: Publishing Large Collections of Digitised Printed Material.
Both chapter 8 and 14 are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. You can find them on this open access page.
Getting Back in the Flow
An Outline for a Semi-Automated Digitisation Workflow to Improve the Quality of Digital Collections
Abstract
The amount of data that is available in digital form has increased enormously in the past years and is still increasing. Heritage institutions have contributed to this trend by mass digitising their heritage content and making these collections available online. Digital Humanities researchers are eager users of these digital collections. However, in this chapter we shall illustrate how the characteristics of mass digitization can be problematic for Digital Humanities researchers. Then, an outline of a modular, adaptive and semi-automated workflow is proposed. The goal of the workflow is to improve the quality of digitised collections and to provide clarity of the digitization process. We describe how such a workflow can support Digital Humanities research. Possible methods and ideas to implement in this workflow are presented and recommendations on how to get started are provided.
Publishing Large Collections of Digitised Printed Material
Abstract
The KB, National Library of the Netherlands, plans to have digitised its entire collection of printed material by 2030. Over 130 million pages have already been processed and are accessible via an online graphical search interface called Delpher, and as data, for computational research purposes. Like the Google Books project, HathiTrust and quite a few national digital libraries all over the world, this type of continuously expanding and evolving large collections of digital surrogates enables online searching, browsing and reading on an unprecedented scale, as well as scientific and scholarly analysis of vast amounts of digital text and images using machines, algorithms and software to “read” or mine the data. Based on the experiences at the KB, this chapter argues that (1) a better understanding of these massive collections of digitised material necessarily starts with the identification of the bibliographic objects that constitute the collections and (2) creating and opening up these large digital collections effectively turns libraries into publishers, urging librarians both to rethink and to reconfirm the traditions of curating library collections.
About The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities
The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, edited by Isabel Galina Russell and Glen Layne-Worthey, covers a wide range of issues encountered in the world’s libraries and archives as they continue to expand their support of, and direct engagement in, Digital Humanities (DH) research and teaching.
In addition to topics related to the practice of librarianship, and to libraries and archives as DH-friendly institutions, they address issues of importance to library and archives workers themselves: labour, sustainability, organisation and infrastructure, and focused professional practices that reflect the increasingly important role of librarians and archivists as active research partners. One of the central motifs of this book is that the “two” fields—DH, on the one hand, and the library, archival, and information sciences on the other—are in fact deeply intertwined, productively interdependent, and mutually reinforcing. They place these on an equal footing, considering how they coexist and collaborate in equal partnership.
This Companion will be of interest to DH practitioners and theorists, especially those who work in libraries and archives, and those who work with them. Likewise, “non-DH” (or “not-yet-DH”) library and archival administrators, reference and public service librarians, cataloguers, and even those who work primarily with the tangible collections will find here echoes and implications of the most venerable traditions and practices of our shared profession.